What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[SolemnDream]

Part 2:

I could not hate Meteion more. I do not care about an anime loli pet that you brought up last-second to be the "big bad", who tries to tell you that all civilizations are going to be nightmare-horrors eventually, especially when they seek "perfection", and who cries black anime blood in a jumpscare, and who wants to destroy everything ever because *some* civilizations die.

Speaking of Meteion: Japanese writers and Square Enix, please stop writing villains who want to destroy everything due to straw-nihilism. As Lightning said when defeating the final boss of the much-better-story FFXIII, "we don't think like that". So take that message to heart. We people who play your games are *smarter* than straw-nihilism. And it's old and boring. If you like nihilism that much, please stop melodramaticizing it, and instead learn about *real-world* nihilism. Fun fact: you can be a nihilist and still be excited to enjoy life to the fullest and make it better for everyone. I'm not even a nihilist and I know that.

As for tribals. The Hippo Riders were fine, but the Omicrons and the Loporrits were an unbelievably-senseless waste of potential. How did we go from Loporrits not knowing what music was to *instant* rave equipment and a hundred years of music theory?! And what for? They should be having an existential crisis about what to do with all their millennia of work on the moon, and how to make it useful. I would have liked that a lot, and it would have made sense! Instead, dance party "because cute"! And then Omicron tribals *could* have been good, except for how childishly forgiving and power-of-friendshipy the characters acted with the enemies who murdered or even genocided them. And the bad messages, and the stupid race at the end.

I would also like to add that the soundtrack for EW was barebones.

Coming off of my love for Shadowbringers, I was unbelievably angry at Endwalker, and having none of it the whole time— save a little bit of the first parts of Sharlayan and Thavnair, most of Garlemald, the time on the moon with the Watcher, and most of Venat (until Meteion). All of the rest of it was god-awful.

I don't know if I can take the MSQ writing in FFXIV seriously anymore; and for a game that is mostly about writing, that is the biggest crime of all. Now that I've seen your EW tribals, and I've seen Pictomancer and Viper, I'm losing a lot of interest in this game. Please treat your audience with intelligence and dignity— I've seen you do better. ARR was good, HW was great, ShB was amazing, and I really liked Gyr Abania when Zenos wasn't involved.

[Vyrerus]

For future reference, if you care SolemnDream, you can edit a post after posting to increase its size to whatever you want, if breaking your posts up bothers you.

Glad to see another honest reaction to Endwalker's poor narrative and side content.

[Swordsman]

Part 2:

I could not hate Meteion more. I do not care about an anime loli pet that you brought up last-second to be the "big bad", who tries to tell you that all civilizations are going to be nightmare-horrors eventually, especially when they seek "perfection", and who cries black anime blood in a jumpscare, and who wants to destroy everything ever because *some* civilizations die.

Couldn't agree more. I remember back in 2021 when this was first revealed to me during my MSQ playthrough, I just sat there in disbelief. I kept thinking to myself: "is this really it? Is this the culmination of ARR and its four expansions? SE couldn't think of anything better than this?..."

Not to mention dynamis, which is equally silly.

[Striker44]

For future reference, if you care SolemnDream, you can edit a post after posting to increase its size to whatever you want, if breaking your posts up bothers you.

Glad to see another honest reaction to Endwalker's poor narrative and side content.

Gotta love when people define "honest" as "agrees with me." Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed what I found to be a great narrative and solid side content. The loporrits brought humor, the FFIV callbacks made me smile, the walk and pre-Meteion cutscene made me tear up. I thought it an excellent culmination of FFXIV up to the present point.

So, what do you say? Are you glad to see my honest reaction about EW's quality content?

[ZavosEsperian]

Gotta love when people define "honest" as "agrees with me." Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed what I found to be a great narrative and solid side content. The loporrits brought humor, the FFIV callbacks made me smile, the walk and pre-Meteion cutscene made me tear up. I thought it an excellent culmination of FFXIV up to the present point.

So, what do you say? Are you glad to see my honest reaction about EW's quality content?

Yes, because the more posts this thread gets, the closer it gets to being 1000 pages.

[OdinelStarrei]

Gotta love when people define "honest" as "agrees with me." Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed what I found to be a great narrative and solid side content. The loporrits brought humor, the FFIV callbacks made me smile, the walk and pre-Meteion cutscene made me tear up. I thought it an excellent culmination of FFXIV up to the present point.

So, what do you say? Are you glad to see my honest reaction about EW's quality content?

Eh...

Yeah, humor is what I want when dealing with an end of the world scenario and thematic nihilism. Those things aren't very merchandise friendly though.

Yeah, FFIV callbacks is what I want when I haven't played the game in over fifteen years and don't tie my own liking of that game to a 1:1 liking of a poor replica of it. "IT HAS THING THAT I LIKED THAT I REMEMBER AND WHEN I SAW IT I CLAPPED!!!!"

Yeah, I found the walk pretty cool before everyone was revived and made the walk meaningless. Your heartstrings being pulled doesn't have any value to me, and me being irritated for the entire last half of the MSQ has no value to you.

Meteion was only good when she was destroying, planning to destroy, or recounting the destruction of civilizations.

I'm about as "glad" to see this as when I see a raccoon digging through "quality" trash and eating garbage.

Good for them, they're getting their "excellent" meal for the night, but it couldn't be me. Glad it isn't.

EDIT: Forgot who wrote this, now I'm gonna have to listen to "millions of people loved this and are enjoying everything every single day how can you say that about them who do you think are you are etc etc"

[SolemnDream]

Not to mention dynamis, which is equally silly.

Yeah, there were so many things to talk about that I temporarily forgot about Dynamis and the Walk of Emotional Manipulation. As bad as Dynamis was, at least it was a concept that could work in a better story. I *hate* the kind of logicless, thoughtless emotional manipulation that was going on in those last scenes including the walk.

[Nadda]

• The mighty Zodiark, which has been build up as this mighty(evil) entity over several expansions, turns out to be nothing but filler trash for the first Endwalker trial
• The true cause of the Final Days is a pet-project from an ancient which goes mad after observing countless dead world and possibly causing the death of several world by projecting negative emotions unto them, and is thus dead-set on bringing despair to every world, upon which said ancient goes mad and is now letting her run her course to test humanity if they can withstand/fight despair
• Venat, who hasn't had her memory wiped + still remembers you from being in Elpis, quite apparently doesn't lift a finger to learn about Dynamis herself or to mobilize the other ancients to end Meteion then and there, and instead chooses to turn herself into Hydaelyn, sunder the world and the inhabitants, thereby forcing them to live with and face despair and gambling that their resilience against despair might be enough to face Meteion one day

I think I can cover this one.

Zodiark was understood to be the evil big bad as much as Ascians were understood to be servants of the big bad.
This all changed in Shadowbringers your example of peak storytelling.
You see in Shadowbringers we learned that both Zodiark and Hydaelyn were primals born from the sacrifices of the ancients.
Zodiark was specifically created to forestall final days with his amazing power. Zodiark is successful but is also a gigantic ravenous monster tempered many remaining ancients.
The Plan the Ancients had next was to have yet another mass sacrifice to fully cleanse the star and to bring every ancients back.
Hydaelyn is created instead sealing away Zodiark and sundering the Star creating the shards as we know them today.

So Zodiark and Hydaelyn are not the penultimate forces of Good and Evil. Whatever created the Final Days the Ancients did not know except for a sound "A cacophonous keening from beneath the Earth" as said by one of the spectred ancients in Amarot - A sound which distorts all living beings within earshot turning them into blasphemes. This sound is the Endsingers song.

Yes, the Final Days is a byproduct of the hubris of Ancient Society and one rogue Ancient going a bit nuts.
Hydaelyns creation was in part to make sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated, though people's shattered existence will be made to suffer in life, it will enrich their purpose such as creating an answer which may overcome despair.
Given so many lives are sacrificed in the process to make both Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the fact that many ancients were tempered into Zodiarks thrall in general, whatever power Hydaelyn has which seals Zodiark away... You could not reasonably say there was an opportunity to tell people there's a blue bird lady at the edge of the universe somewhere lets go get her that'll fix everything!

[Vyrerus]

I think I can cover this one.

Not really a good cover, especially with Encyclopedia Eorzea 3 out.

Zodiark was made to stop the Final Days as The Ancients understood them. He required massive amounts of aether to do this, and he was successful, but the planet was still burnt up and ending as shown from the orbital view of Etheirys in the Amaurot dungeon. So they again made another sacrifice, the number of sacrifices now totaling 75% of the survivors of The Final Days. They then planned a third sacrifice that would have to wait for new life to crop up on Etheirys, their intent being to sacrifice new life to bring back their sacrificed friends and family.

Venat was resolved to see the time loop through, or a slave to fate, pick your poison. There are no other valid reads. To do this, she had to incite a civil war by taking followers onto her side. Followers who were exempted from or refused to sacrifice themselves in the first place, leading to some very sticky morality on display, since the game intends for us to view Venat as a hero (not evil at a minimum, as stated/requested by Yoshi-P).

To justify their civil war, she lays a lot of blame on Zodiark saying that the Ancient Ascians have already gone too far, given him too much, and that another sacrifice to bring back the ones first sacrificed would be wrong and against Amaurotine Ascian code of conduct. Nevermind that she eschews that code of conduct herself when she refused to return to the star after fulfilling her duty as Azem in some hundreds or thousands of unspecified years before even the events of Elpis.

To become Hydaelyn she lied to her followers and then had them all sacrifice their lives to her, and in order to make herself strong enough to perform the Sundering and contend with Zodiark, their souls and lives and all future possible lives were burnt up completely in the ritual. A ritual that they had to steal from the Convocation, because it is the same ritual as the one used to create Zodiark.

The game's narrative also has a haphazard way of displaying that Zodiark tempered the Convocation. Emet says he did, but shows no signs of tempering. None of the other Convocation members show any signs either, and even the one who became Zodiark's heart is still able to be more reasonable than any other tempered person we've been shown in the setting. We get a tongue in cheek joke from the Hummingways about Zodiark being so powerful that his powerful seduced their minds, "a little tug." This makes it different from other tempering, which is chocked up to being a purposeful alteration and ability granted to primals by Ascians altering the creation magicks for them.

This is all mildly at odds with the only actual in game portrayal of the Amaurotine civil war that we're shown in game, the Qitana Ravel cave paintings, which clearly depict a being of white and a being of black clashing with followers in the shape of men beneath them of matching colors on opposing sides.

So Zodiark is a misinformed, literal savior god who may have been able to solve the problem with the right information. Hydaelyn is a god made to split him, and then kill all of mankind through a reductive, unstable mutation. This ensures that the Warrior of Light and our present would come into being, but it is very evil on an absolute moral level.

To accept it as the only way forward clashes with Final Fantasy's most basic premise in the series' very first entry. It also means you must accept that in spite of having full control over The Echo, and having an unremoveable tracker branded onto Meteion, there was no way to tell the Convocation and make them believe Venat. Which simply isn't true, give that The Echo lets you open the whole of your life's memories to other people (see Fordola experiencing the WoL's entire life in Stormblood for an example), and if Venat were to do that for Hythlodaeus and Emet-selch, they would regain the information lost in their memories from Ktsis Hyperboreia.

Never mind the kick in the teeth at the very end of everything as Meteion is dying, "What I was looking for was on Etheirys all along..." Literal in game confirmation that there was nothing actually wrong with the Ancients, and that it was merely Venat's fear and co-opted power that was their undoing.

She could have been a real hero. She could have been their savior, even. Instead, she's responsible for more death in the setting than literally anyone else, responsible for more than even Meteion.

[Nadda]

No, my coverage was sufficient. You don't even need the Third Encylopedia for that information you think I missed.
It's within the game. And at any rate, the character limit prohibits me from making longer posts.
Further, I disagree fundamentally with your understanding of the story.
It only reads this way if you misrepresent Venat in completely bad faith and waving away the hubristic nature of the Ancients as being morally unassailable.
The story gives enough reasonable justifications for the course it took.